Sex Crimes

It's New Year's Eve when Christine Chandler first picks up Scott DeSalvo, ayounger man, for what she tells herself is just a one-night stand. Ten monthslater she stands accused of a crime so hideous that the tabloids have dubbedher the "Boston Fury." To her friends and colleagues, Christine is theembodiment of self-discipline. Harvard educated, a top-flight lawyer, thirty-eight, and relentlessly single, she likes to think she's in totalcontrol. But as Christine describes the series of sexual encounters that led tothe night in question, her startling poise is gradually betrayed by newspaperclips, police reports, and the depositions of those who thought they knewher.From the acclaimed author of "Life-Size," an unflinching portrayal of awoman who walks the thin psychological line between fantasy and reality as asexual obsession escalates into a single, irrevocable act of violence.

In precise, razor-sharp prose, Shute evokes Christine's ever loosening grip onreality and in so doing shows how thirty-eight years of control can lead, inexorably, to one moment of fury.

Jenefer Shute is a professor in the English Department at Hunter College. Shelives in New York City and is the author of "Life-Size."

Praise for Jenefer Shute's "Life-Size":

"Beautiful, terrifying and marvelously written. The miracle of "Life-Size" is its transcendence of its subject, so that it becomes a novel about the humanneed to control the uncontrollable world, or makes us ask ourselves thosenecessary questions: What is the self? And if we lost it, how can we find itagain? This luminous, horrifying and elegantly written book about a womanstarving in both mind and body is absolutely unique."
--Susan FrombergSchaeffer

"This novel may be brutal, but its rewards are many. Shute writes withvividness and bleak wit, and does not allow us the easy way out...Atranscendent work of fiction."
-- "Washington Post"

"Chilling...Shute brilliantly captures the torment and self-loathing of abody-obsessed person."
-- "People"